WHY I WRITE: ESSAYS BY SAADAT HASAN MANTO (12 page)

The Background

Manto’s stories about prostitutes and barbarism and necrophilia did not go down well in Pakistan. He became a target for moralists. Angered by days spent in courtrooms where he was treated poorly, and once also convicted for obscenity, he tore into his critics by contrasting their morality with his in this piece. His frustration and bitterness was evident, and that was unusual for Manto. He also took a swipe at Jinnah’s Muslim League, and he was amongst its first and most devastating critics. I’m not sure if someone actually published this piece in a journal or whether it was just found in his papers, written for himself one drunk afternoon, and sent for his collected works.

‘Have you heard the latest?’

• –
  From Korea?
  

‘No, not that.’

• –
  About the Begum of Junagadh?
  

‘No…’

• –
  Some sensational murder again, is it?
  

‘No, actually about Saadat Hasan Manto.’

• –
  Why? Did he die?
  

‘No, he was arrested yesterday.’

• –
  For obscenity?
  

‘Yes. They searched his property too.’

• –
  Did they find any cocaine? Some contraband booze perhaps?
  

‘No. The newspapers say nothing illegal came to hand.’

• –
  The bastard’s existence is itself illegal, I’d say.
  

‘True.’

• –
  Then why did they not charge him with that?
  

‘We should leave that to the government. It knows how to fix people like him.’

• –
  No doubt, it does.
  

‘So what do you say? This time Manto must hang for sure.’

• –
  I hope he does. That’ll shut the bastard up once and for all.
  

‘You’re right. After what the high court said about
Thanda Gosht
, he should have hung himself.’

• –
  And if he’d failed in the attempt…
  

‘He would be charged with attempted suicide and locked up anyway.’

• –
  I think that’s why he didn’t try it. Else he’s quite an extreme fellow.
  

‘So you think he’s going to keep writing his pornography?’

• –
  Yaar! This is the fifth case against him. If he wanted to behave, he’d have stopped after the first case and taken up something respectable.
  

‘True. Become a government servant perhaps, or he could have sold ghee. Or, like Ghulam Ahmad from Mohalla Pir Gilaniya, he would have come up with a miracle cure for impotence.’

• –
  Yes. Many respectable things are open to him. But he’s a godless man. Mark my words – he’ll go back to writing pornography the moment he can.
  

‘Do you know what will come to be finally?’

• –
  I foresee something quite bad.
  

‘There will be six cases against him in Punjab, ten in Sindh, four in the North West Frontier and three in Pakistan. He’ll go insane just from the proceedings.’

• –
  He’s already gone mad twice, the newspapers reported the other day.
  

‘That was him being farsighted. He was rehearsing so that when he actually does go nuts he can spend his time in the asylum at ease, already accustomed to it.’

• –
  But what will he do there?
  

‘He’ll try to bring the lunatics to their senses.’

• –
  Is that a crime?
  

‘Not sure. Only a lawyer can say if there’s a section in Pakistan’s Penal Code for this. I think there should be. Bringing the insane to their senses is punishable under Section 292.’

• –
  In its judgment on
  Thanda Gosht
  , the high court said the law has nothing to do with the writer’s intent, or what his character is. It must only see if there is filth in his writing.
  

‘That’s precisely why I was saying that whatever the intent be in bringing the lunatics to their senses, the unnatural aspect of the whole thing should be considered.’

• –
  These are legal things, sub-judice as they say – we should stay away from them.
  

‘True. It’s good you reminded me. I think it’s a crime even to discuss them in private.’

• –
  Tell me, if Manto really does go mad, what happens to his wife and children?
  

‘They can go to hell! What has the law to do with that?’

• –
  Yes, but do you think the government will step in to help them?
  

‘The government should do something. It should tell the newspapers it is considering the matter.’

• –
  And by the time they’ve “considered”, the thing will be settled. Brilliant.
  

‘Obviously. That’s how it has been, always.’

• –
  Let Manto and his family go to hell. Tell me this, how will the high court ruling affect Urdu literature?
  

‘Let Urdu literature also go to hell.’

• –
  Don’t say that! I’m told that literature and culture are a nation’s assets.
  

‘I only consider cold cash an asset – something physical and lying in a bank vault.’

• –
  That’s a clever way of putting it. But if this is so, then Momin, Mir, Ahsan, Zauq, Saadi, Hafiz etc – will all of them be wiped out through Section 292?
  

‘I believe so. Else why should the law exist?’

• –
  All the poets and writers should come to their senses and take up respectable professions.
  

‘Join politics, perhaps?’

• –
  Only the Muslim League, right?
  

‘Of course. That’s what I meant. To join another party is to spread obscenity.’

• –
  Absolutely.
  

‘There are, of course, other respectable things they could do. Put their writing talent to use by sitting outside post offices and writing letters on behalf of other people. In chaste language, naturally. Or they could scrawl advertisements, you know those random ones that walls are full of. It’s a brand new nation with thousands of vacancies. They could fill some of them.’

• –
  Yes, there’s also much vacant land they could till.
  

‘I hear the government’s thinking of setting aside some of it on the Ravi River, and banishing all the hookers and whores there. Far from the city. Why not include these poets and writers and pack them off there as well?’

• –
  Splendid idea! They’ll certainly be at home there.
  

‘What do you think will happen?’

• –
  What else? They’ll rot there. Wallowing in the filth.
  

‘It’ll be fascinating. I think Manto will be delighted with all the material around him.’

• –
  But that fellow will write about the whores rather than sleep with them. He’ll give us their stories.
  

‘True. What he sees in the wretched of the earth, why he insists on ennobling them, I have never understood. The rest of us see them with contempt and disgust. How can he bear to embrace them?’

• –
  His sister Ismat
  *
  says that he’s fascinated by things that repel other people. It’s true. Where everyone is dressed in spotless white, he wants to go covered in mud and slime and make a nuisance of himself.
  

‘His brother Mumtaz Hussain says he sets off every morning looking for goodness in the stomach of such a person as you might never expect.’

• –
  That’s quite obscene if you ask me. To expect goodness instead of intestines.
  

‘And what about spreading muck on those clothed in pure white?’

• –
  Obscene too.
  

‘Where do you think he gets so much slime from?’

• –
  No idea. He finds it somewhere.
  

‘Let’s pray that god deliver us from his contemptible filth. This might be good for Manto also.’

(They pray)

‘Lord! You’re merciful and gracious. We’re both sinners but we ask that Saadat Hasan Manto, son of Ghulam Hasan Manto, a good and pious man, please be taken away from this world.

‘He has little use for it. He eschews the fragrances of Your world and runs towards its odours.

‘He shuts his eyes when faced with light and goes in search of dark corners. He wants to see the raw and the naked. Sweet things he dislikes, he delights in the bitter.

‘He finds nothing of virtue in housewives and seeks the company of sluts.

‘He bathes in filth. When we cry, he giggles. When one is meant to laugh, he howls.

‘He insists on wiping soot from the blackened faces of the immoral and on showing their faces to us.

‘He’s forsaken You, Lord, and worships the devil.

‘O Master of the universe! Rid us of this man who insists on making evil normal. He loves mischief – the courts’ proceedings are proof of this. Try him in Your eternal court so that justice may finally come to him.

‘But be careful, Lord! He’s very wily. Make sure You’re not snared by one of his wiles. Of course, You know it all, but we’re just reminding You.

‘We only ask that You remove him from our world. And if he should remain, then remain as one of us – we who hide the world’s filth and carry on like all is pure.

‘Amen!’

– (Originally published as
Pasmanzar
)

The Great Pothole Mystery

India’s writers have a strange problem. Why doesn’t anything work here? Why are things they notice not noticed by the others? Manto migrated to Pakistan and, out of work from Bollywood, began to wonder about such things. This is a piece he wrote to express his bewilderment with what was happening around him.

You know me as a writer of fables. The courts know me as a pornographer. The government sometimes refers to me as a Communist, and at other times as one of the nation’s great literary figures.

Sometimes the doors of employment are shut to me. Other times they are opened. Sometimes I’m classified as an “unwanted person” and evicted from my house.

Then they turn around and say: ‘No, it’s fine. You can keep your place.’

I have wondered in the past, and still do today, what exactly it is that I am. This nation — the “biggest Islamic state on earth” as we are often reminded — what’s my standing in it?

This country, which we call Pakistan and which is very dear to me, what’s my place here?

I haven’t found it yet. This makes me restless. This is what has sent me sometimes to the lunatic asylum, and sometimes to the hospital.

Whatever else it may be that I am, I am quite certain that I’m a human being. Proof of this resides in the fact that I have a good side to me and a bad one. I speak the truth, but sometimes I lie. I don’t do namaaz, but I am familiar with the act of bowing.

If I see a wounded stray dog, I am disturbed for hours. But I’m not affected enough to take it home and nurse its wounds. When a friend is in trouble for want of money, I am inevitably troubled and saddened. But often I have desisted from offering help.

This is because I need money to buy whisky. When I meet a handicapped, legless girl I think hard about what her life must be like. I consider if it will change in case I were to marry her. But the thought flees soon after I mention it to my wife.

I am, as I said, a teller of stories. My imagination soars, true, but it plummets in the face of reality and I think to myself that if I had to ultimately fall, why was it that I even soared in the first place. But I continue to be disturbed by small things.

I can’t bear to see carelessly discarded banana peels. I can’t believe how stupid are people who do this. I feel saddened by those who catch rats in their own house and let them loose in another’s neighbourhood. By those who clear the rubbish from their property only to litter someone else’s doorstep.

It is said that this sort of behaviour is the product of illiteracy. If this is so, and certainly it seems universally accepted as being so, why is it that education isn’t made universal? Does it not show that those in charge of society and its laws are themselves illiterate?

I am shaken by the culture of our leaders. A man becomes minister and the road to his house (inevitably in a good neighbourhood) is kept spotless and smoked for mosquitoes.

But roads that actually need cleaning, the neighbour-hoods of the poor that need smoking, are ignored. Even if a mosquito were to bite the minister, what of it?

Those thousands of children who spend their childhood in rancid and fetid air are far more valuable than a minister.

These things are known to all, so what’s the problem then? One can only wonder.

I often liken the relationship of the State with its citizens to that of a troubled marriage.

As a writer I find the relationship fascinating. Consider it. There is tension, and often unpleasantness, in both the union of man and woman, and of State and citizen. There is a great deal of hypocrisy too, but the relationship is not ever severed.

The intercourse between State and citizens (it will be appropriate to call it forcible intercourse) also produces offspring as a marriage does. But frightening ones, like the “Safety Act and Ordinance”. Offspring that resemble their father, the State, more than the citizenry.

I don’t want to say much about this, save the fact that it is beyond my understanding, as many other things are.

I can understand the aggressive capitalism-loving nationalism of America. I also understand the real meaning of Russia’s hammer and sickle. But what happens here, in Pakistan, is beyond me.

It’s possible that what’s happening is too sophisticated for me to follow, I accept that, but it’s possible also that it’s too crude for me to follow. I shall always regret that there’s been nobody to explain this to me.

What can a short story writer make of the pact with America that arms us? Then what can he make of our military pact with, of all nations, Turkey? He cannot even wonder what became of the inquiry into Liaquat Ali Khan’s assassination. He dare not ask whether Liaquat’s killer, slain immediately by the mob, received justice or whether he was also murdered unjustly.

A short story writer can, however, ask what the two potholes on the lane leading to McLeod Road from the Telegraph Office mean. Those two potholes may have been perhaps filled over by now. But the truck that fell victim to them is certainly still there.

It isn’t clear how long it will remain there wounded, asking, as I am, what the meaning of those two potholes is.

If they were dug to ensure that in the night’s insufficient light, tongas fell into them, horses died or were crippled, cyclists fractured their limbs or some motorcyclist singing film songs was made to see stars, if they were dug for this reason, I have no problem with them.

Perhaps the municipal corporation should do this sort of thing to keep citizens alert. But if I were to actually say this, that I have no problem with it, the government might get me. They might say: ‘Well, you don’t have a problem with it, but we do.’ Truth be told, taking objection and having a problem with things around us isn’t done these days.

I told you that I haven’t yet understood my place in Pakistan. I assume that I’m some great literary figure. I’m told I am a writer of some renown in Urdu literature (if that also were untrue, life would be even more unbearable). I have now discovered something of my real standing, and the meaning of those two potholes. They may seem unimportant, but are actually most important.

Seemingly unimportant because people may get hurt even without them. The unending and silly accidents would have continued to plague us here. Important, because they demonstrated that life could go on without the corporation.

A while ago I got a notice from the corporation saying I was an unwanted person, and ought to empty the house allotted to me. I thought this notice was itself quite unwanted.

Anyway, a few days ago I left the Tea House and hailed a tonga. When we neared the Telegraph Office, I thought we should go to Beadon Road from McLeod Road so that I could buy some flowers for my three little girls.

As the tonga turned towards McLeod Road, I suddenly spotted two monstrous holes directly in front. I’m astonished I saw them at all, for I’m quite blind in the dark. I screamed.

The alarmed coachman yanked his reins and the horse stopped. So violently did he rear that the tonga went a couple of feet back. If he had stepped forward another foot, we would have fallen in. The coachman thanked me profusely for saving his horse from injury. A few yards away we could see a collapsed tonga and its crippled horses whimpering in pain.

Now here’s the first thought that came to me: Pakistan’s finest short story writer has been saved. I thought of the nation at this point, not my wife or my three little girls.

I thought of myself as the nation’s property, saved from damage and destruction. The truth is of course that had I died, it would have been the end of an “unwanted person”.

A few loved ones and a couple of friends might have shed a tear or two. But this nation, which I thought I belonged to, would have no tears for me.

Many things continue to remain beyond my understanding but I particularly can’t figure out why these two potholes near the Telegraph Office did not have warning signs around them.

Boards to inform passers-by: ‘Look, if you want to kill yourself, please fall in. But in fact if you want to live, please avoid this place. If god had wanted you dead, He’d send you on your way to the promised land even on a straight and safe road.’

That they did not put up such a board is a mystery. Certainly it is beyond the understanding of a mere writer of stories. But even so he must ask — what was the nature of this mystery? If nothing else, he could have made a little story of it.

Near the Telegraph Office, where some time ago were two potholes, a wounded truck still stands, on three wheels, and a lot of bricks. I’m not sure what it’s trying to say to me, or to the corporation.

In my opinion, the government should immediately set up a commission to investigate those potholes. It can produce enough paperwork to fill up those two holes, and take long enough in doing so to ensure that other holes are dug in the meantime so that yet other commissions may be formed.

Those two potholes – zindabad!

And horses and humans that fall into them to die – murdabad!

– (Originally published as
Do Gaddhay)